Premiere: See Yeasayer’s New Music Video Shot in the World’s Trippiest Laboratory

The tower of Naturalis in the Dutch province of Leiden is like something sprung from the mind of Terry Gilliam: twenty stories of shelves lined with preserved animals, insects, and fossils. Row upon row of jars containing discomfiting specimens. The tower houses the largest collection of natural history objects in Holland, and it’s sealed from the public — unless you’re Ruben van Leer, and you want to film the music video for the latest Yeasayer single, “Glass of the Microscope.” In which case you get the whole place to yourself.

“For a moment, among these scientific objects, we felt the entire history of the city,” van Leer, a Dutch filmmaker and artist, told WIRED. “We wanted to fuse that history with ideas of an evolutionary future. After technology saves the world — as Silicon Valley wants us to believe — what then?”

The last track on Yeasayer’s acclaimed 2012 album Fragrant World, “Glass of the Microscope” is heavy with the band’s characteristic silky synths and torpid melodies. There’s a post-apocalyptic vibe in the video that is subtle but persistent, imagining band members Chris Keating, Ira Wolf Tuton, and Anand Wilder as scientists struggling to find a cure for an unnamed global affliction. In addition to the Naturalis tower, the band filmed in molecular biologist Hans Tanke’s lab at Leiden University, one of the oldest research universities in Europe and the place where the 17th-century Dutch microbiologist Antoine van Leeuwenhoek developed an early prototype of the microscope.

Van Leer specializes in the refraction of the scientific through art. His in-progress opera film, Symmetry, was the first project selected by the arts@CERN program in Geneva, where he spent time shooting film at the Large Hadron Collider and thinking about how concepts in high-energy particle physics inform narratives of bodies in motion on a macroscopic scale.

“Through technology, we can observe our world from an increasing number of perspectives, and interact with its data,” said van Leer, who created the film with co-producer and creative partner Jamie Timms. “In this way, storytelling becomes a part of reality. Pop culture becomes science becomes culture again.”

There’s a tension between analog and digital — as well as the scientific and the philosophical — throughout the new video, which layers film shot through microscopes with 3-D computer animation created using a Microsoft Kinect motion sensor camera. As objects preserved in jars merge with objects pressed between plates of glass beneath the microscope, human bodies dance through those same microscopic images.

“What if the causes of certain material manifestations that seem so big in our world can be found on a microscopic scale within ourselves?” asked van Leer. “Through the pressure and response of our environment, we’ll be forced to think in more symbiotic ways.” In the end, this cure for what ails the world is “left to the imagination of the audience.”

A final, delicious fact about van Leer: his father is the lead vocalist and organist for the prog-rock group Focus, whose instrumental cut “Hocus Pocus” blew up in the U.S. in the early ’70s. As a kid, van Leer says he would ask his father why he became a musician, and his dad would reply, “I make music for the spheres.” Van Leer is similarly enigmatic when he speaks about his own work and what he hopes to achieve with it. “The power of art, for me, lies in aspiration,” he said. “We already have the power to create. What world will we make?”

Correction [9:10 A.M. PST, 10/17/13]: A previous version of this story stated that Van Leer’s father was listed the lead vocalist and organist; he was the lead composer and flutist. It also referred to Antoine van Leeuwenhoek’s work on the electron microscope, rather than microscope.